I don't really mind that kind of viral sharing, especially when the signature stays intact.
I have yet to see any commercial exploitation, if I did, I would definitely call a lawyer and get my fee + suitable compensation.

And therein lies the drawback of tineye. It has a tiny database of known images, certainly when compared with google image search. Search didn't fail because it requires login; google found the image based on surrounding text.

You make a great point that we all have learned from, if one is interested in seeing if his/her image is out there, one would need to do a Google image search for the metadata and tineye for a search that looks for clones of the image based on its 1/0's

I've played with TinEye a bit, and never had much luck understanding the circumstances under which it works well or poorly. I don't think it's ever found anything of mine on APUG, but it clearly crawls Flickr---yet it often fails to recognize my stuff there, as well. But when it does find a match, it's often notably successful at recognizing different treatments of the same image---different toning, sharpening, cropping, stuff like that.

Google seems to have a worse matching algorithm but a larger crawl database---it found some instances of my images being linked from sites that aggregate Flickr content, though interestingly it didn't find the originals at Flickr itself---nor, again, at APUG. (Is the gallery protected by a robots.txt file, maybe? That would explain a lot.)

In the defense of both, soft matching of image or audio content is INCREDIBLY hard. We don't understand squat about how our brains do signal processing, and transformations that hardly even register with a human observer can completely flummox a quantitative algorithm. As a professional in a related field, I'm amazed that TinEye works as well as it does and I'd love to know what goes on under the hood.

-NT

Nathan Tenny
San Diego, CA, USA

The lady of the house has to be a pretty swell sort of person to put up with the annoyance of a photographer.
-The Little Technical Library, _Developing, Printing, And Enlarging_